What American AI owes to European science
LIFT Policy Paper 2026-05 — November 2026
Europe supplies about a quarter of the scientific articles cited by US artificial intelligence patents, including several building blocks of deep learning. For equal output in each field, European articles are cited by these patents nearly twice as often as Chinese or Japanese articles. The economic value of this science is realized in the United States: nearly nine out of ten patents that cite it are filed by US companies. This position is eroding: Europe’s share is falling for recent articles, along with its weight in global research, and AI research is shifting toward companies, where Europe has little presence. French articles are cited less than an average article in their field, and France produces half as much cited science per researcher as the United Kingdom.
ai, innovation, science
Europe supplies about a quarter of the scientific articles cited by US artificial intelligence patents, including several building blocks of deep learning. For equal output in each field, European articles are cited by these patents nearly twice as often as Chinese or Japanese articles. The economic value of this science is realized in the United States: nearly nine out of ten patents that cite it are filed by US companies. This position is eroding: Europe’s share is falling for recent articles, along with its weight in global research, and AI research is shifting toward companies, where Europe has little presence. French articles are cited less than an average article in their field, and France produces half as much cited science per researcher as the United Kingdom.
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